1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to managing data and more particular to a system and method for creating data_ties.
2. Description of the Prior Art
People underline a phrase or sentence in a book, or ponder over a quote in a magazine article, because it's connected to other ideas they already have. Often these ideas that came from other books and highlights they had read or marked previously. Usually such a collection of underlined sentences or quotes or even entire articles remains just that, a jumbled collection that is totally unconnected and extremely difficult to retrieve.
It would be advantageous to have a way that one can record and see all these connections, and not just become aware of the connection, but also see why it was made. Note-taking software is known in the art. However, the primary function of existing note-taking software is to categorize, search and find a specific note from the single stack of an entire collection of notes. What is badly needed is a way to create, maintain and retrieve is a stackless presentation of how the notes relate to one another.
The note-taking software and the associated storage systems on the market today are useful for creating, organizing and searching notes. In those systems, each note is like a separate piece of paper in a 10-foot stack. If you can remember what's in the stack you'll have no problem finding it when you need it.
But what happens to the data you forgot you saved? What if you could spread out that stack across your floor and instantly see how all your notes relate to one another. What if you could visually represent why you created a particular note in the first place? And what if when you picked up a particular note, say a Bible passage you once saved, you revealed a whole web of photos, articles, a college paper you once wrote, and a letter you received from your son twenty years later, that are each related to that Biblical passage?
Delicious.com, Diigo, Spring It, DevonThink, and Evernote are prior art systems for note-taking or bookmarking on the market today. All of these systems present a top-to-bottom list of a user's notes that he can tag and categorize and search for particular note(s).
In 2012, Amazon Corp. announced that its electronic books were now outselling print books for the first time. However, the functionality of electronic books is still in its infancy. As far as highlights and margin notes go, many readers find a print book a lot more user-friendly than an electronic book. However, it would be extremely advantageous if the user could start associating quotes from one electronic book with quotes from other electronic books in a visual manner. Then suddenly electronic books can do something that print books never could.
As an aid to understanding the problem and the present invention, it can be considered that each of highlight, quote or note is a separate tree in a particular user's forest of notes. The present invention allows a walk through that forest. As the walk progresses, the user can see pieces of Yarn tying various trees to one another, the yarn showing all the connections the user has made between a quote from a novel highlighted many years ago, a photograph seen in the newspaper last month, a the sermon heard a few hours ago. Now the user is not just seeing all the data he deemed important enough to save, but he is seeing why it was deemed important, and how it relates it to other data over time. The only reason anyone has ever highlighted anything is because in his mind it is tied to something he already knew or had experienced. It is an object of the present invention aims to record not just the data, but how the user understood and used that data.
As an example, imagine a photo of an oak tree that a user saved to his database. It's not just any oak tree but a photo of an oak tree in the backyard of where the user grew up. The present invention takes the oak tree out of the stack of notes and shows it to the user in its most meaningful context. It does this by showing how the important items that were saved later in the user's life relate to one another, which is the only reason they were saved in the first place. Perhaps it was under that oak tree that the user and his brother made a life-long pact, signed in blood, that brought them where they are today—say, the biggest screenplay writing team in Hollywood. In this example, a photo of the oak tree, the pact, examples of the later success and a note recording the date of the pact are all related and should be able to be accessed and displayed in a related manner so that now the photo of the oak tree carries its true meaning. The oak tree has significance not because it is an oak tree, but because an important event happened under it.